


I Once Was Lost

by Deannie



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Supermagnificent AU, telepathic trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-17 22:33:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7288732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He turned his head to the side, watching a young woman who sat on the edge of another soldier’s bed. MacPhee, he thought the boy’s name was. Strange kid from Louisiana. Liked playing dice and reading Greek myths. He’d taken a round in the chest, but Chris couldn’t see any blood or bandages there. And what a girl was doing on the battlefield, he didn’t think on too hard. He didn’t have the brainpower left as he lay here burning with pain and bleeding to death slowly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Once Was Lost

**Author's Note:**

> For the hc-bingo prompt "telepathic trauma."

The heat in Texas in July was unrelenting. Always. The only thing the rain accomplished by pattering against the tent over his head was to make the air more oppressively thick.

And Chris Larabee was having enough trouble breathing already. His body felt heavy, drained. It nearly was, he supposed. There couldn’t be much more blood left in him, after all, right? The pain was so constant that he could almost pretend it was the way the world was supposed to be.

Almost.

He turned his head to the side, watching a young woman who sat on the edge of another soldier’s bed. MacPhee, he thought the boy’s name was. Strange kid from Louisiana. Liked playing dice and reading Greek myths. He’d taken a round in the chest, but Chris couldn’t see any blood or bandages there. And what a girl was doing on the battlefield, he didn’t think on too hard. He didn’t have the brainpower left as he lay here burning with pain and bleeding to death slowly.

She was pretty, though. Very young, maybe nineteen, with long straight brown hair and pale skin. Real thin, like she’d seen hard times.

“You are awake again, Chris,” she said quietly. Her words had an accent to them that he’d never heard before… except that he had. It was confusing. The boy she sat next to was no longer MacPhee, but a tall skinny kid of her age and with her looks, though his hair was a silvery gray. She rose and floated gracefully toward him, like she wasn’t really part of the world. “I was getting worried.”

Chris smiled bitterly at that. “Little late for worry now,” he told the girl he knew and didn’t. “Ain’t gonna be long before I don’t wake up again.” The pain in his hip and leg flared violently to life and he lifted his head to look down at the mangled appendage. “Why the hell haven’t they just cut the damn thing off?” he hissed through clenched teeth, trying not to scream. God damn, he didn’t want to die here. He just wanted to go home.

Strangely, she smiled, sitting on his cot without disturbing it in the slightest. “You still need two legs, Chris,” she told him, as if it was simple logic.

“Don’t matter if they bury me with one leg or two, I reckon,” he replied.

“You’re not dying,” she said softly. _Wanda_. Her eyes were like mahogany, brown suffused with red, and held a great sadness, and Chris felt like he was on the edge of understanding what was going on without really understanding any of it. “I can’t let you do that. Peg would never forgive me.”

Peg. Peggy. Brown hair and rich brown eyes, soft curves and a touch that could save a life…

Chris’s leg screamed for attention and he screamed with it.

“Let it go, Chris,” Wanda whispered. _Maximoff_. “Please! He used this memory to keep you here.” Her hand on his head seemed wreathed in red smoke, long tendrils, like a pipe or a cigar…

“Who?” he asked, gritting his teeth as his leg burned. God, he remembered this. It had burned so badly then, the nerve endings set afire by the shrapnel and debris that had nearly severed the limb. The damn thing had bled and bled and bled…

“Lord,” Wanda said, standing swiftly and heading for the boy who wasn’t MacPhee but _was_ her brother. The kid twitched and bucked and Chris suddenly realized that the word she’d spoken wasn’t a prayer or an imprecation, but a name.

Maxwell Lord. Rich kid. Brainmelter.

Brain… melter.

Chris lay with the thought, staring at Pietro’s body as it shivered. “Where are we?” he asked. They’d been… somewhere not home.

“Back at the hospital,” Wanda whispered. She was exhausted. Almost spent. Scarlet smoke loosed from her fingers to swirl around her brother’s head and Pietro finally calmed. The cot wasn’t quite the cot beside Chris’s in that tent in Texas anymore, and the rain had stopped. “We brought your bodies home.”

Chris grinned suddenly. Home. “Our minds are still missing?” he asked sarcastically.

Wanda didn’t answer, concentrating on Pietro. She leaned down, touching her forehead to his for a long moment before he dissolved into a silver mist and was gone.

“Is he…?” Chris asked after a very long moment, afraid of the answer. Afraid of what it might mean for him.

Wanda looked up and smiled, though tears were still standing on her cheeks. “No longer missing.” She rose and the cot she’d sat on was gone, the tent fading a little as she approached him. “Are you found as well?”

Something shifted in his brain, and Chris took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Reckon maybe I am.”

The crushing pain was gone, now the same distant, sharp, clear but ignorable memory it had been for years now. His head hurt instead, but the pain was bearable. Someone was holding his hand, and he knew, when he opened his eyes, that he’d be home.

So he did just that, and Wanda Maximoff stood to one side of his bed while Peggy Carter sat on the other.

“Pietro?” he asked, voice clear where he thought it would be rough and dying like _he’d_ been only minutes ago. “And Halligan?” He hadn’t seen the young shapeshifter in his dream… vision… whatever-it-was.

Peggy gripped his hand more tightly and he knew why Michael was absent from that tent. “I’m sorry. He was dead when we got there. Please believe me, we found you as soon as we could,” she told him earnestly. “Pietro is right beside you.”

His eyes followed Wanda as she moved to sit on the bed next to his. Pietro lay there pale and drawn and staring at him.

“I do not think I want to go _investigating_ with you again, Captain Larabee,” he said in that thick Balkan accent of his. The ever-present humor put something right in Chris’s chest, though. “Perhaps I will transfer to another team.”

Chris chuckled, ignoring his head’s protest. “Not sure there’s one who’d have you, kid,” he told him. It was true, too. Mostly. Pietro was a force of nature—and not just because of his supernatural speed.

Speaking of supernatural… “Lord is dead, right?” He remembered something about dynamite, but it was all sort of hazy.

Peg stood up and took a deep breath—a clear sign that she was no longer completely swamped by worry and was trying to pretend she never had been. “You did manage to blow him into a distressing number of pieces, yes,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could.

Chris sighed sadly. “That was Michael’s idea.”

“He was a good man,” Pietro whispered. Chris watched Wanda grip her twin brother’s hand tightly and wondered what she’d’ve done if they’d lost him, too.

“You are all good men,” Peg clarified. She looked down at Chris and her eyes softened. “We’re very glad the two of you are back with us.”

Chris looked around the infirmary and thought about the word that kept coming to him during the vision Lord had trapped them in. _Home._  He smiled up at her in sudden contentment and put his hands behind his head.

“Where else would we be?”

*****  
the end


End file.
